Search Engine Optimization – SEO – is becoming a great internet business. It delivers digital services. The aim is to bring the pages to the top of the search engine result pages – SERP’s. A top position on the SERP for your key words – KW’s, can make the difference between success and failure, the difference between a fortune and fiasco. You or a consultant optimize the pages on your site for KW’s related to your business and content. Submitting your site to directories and portals is related to SEO and is still important as this is written in late February 2006. Study Bruce Clay’s search engine relationship chart, and you see that two directories are very important, since they feed some of the most important search engines on the internet. The two directories are dmoz and Yahoo. Point your mouse over the green circle named dmoz and then the circle named Yahoo, and you see that these two directories in a sense divide the internet in two, even if the Google directory is also important. So it is important that you submit your site to dmoz and Yahoo. You must be very careful with the description of your site and the KW’s you choose. It is important to find KW’s with high usage and low competition, socalled low hanging fruit. You may use tools like WordTracker or b-found to find competitive KW’s for your business. Submit only once to dmoz and do not submit twice, since that takes you to the end of the cue. Submit and forget, since it may take years before your site is included. Submit your site to as many portals and directories that your time may afford. But be aware that time is money too, and buying pay per click PPC like Google Adwords, may be more cost effective. But SEO is about more than finding the right KW’s and getting inbound links – IBL’s to your site. In the end it is about good design, code and content. What was allowed yesterday may be regarded as spam today. It is said that if you buy a book about SEO, it is outdated when it hits the market and you must always listen to what Big Daddy has to tell.

Jakob Nielsen is one of the experts on design and content. In an article dated February 21, 2006 he writes about avoiding within page links since:

Users have developed a strong mental model for link following, which has several elements: 1. Clicking a link navigates you to a new place. 2. After you click, the old page goes away. 3. A new page loads into the window, replacing the old page. 4. You first see the top of the new page. 5. The Back button returns you to the old page. Because almost all clicks work this way, users have very strong expectations that the Web will work this way. It's a simple model that makes sense. Within-page links violate all five points in users' mental model of links: 1. A within-page link scrolls the window rather than navigating you to a new location. This confuses users: they assume they'll get new information, but if they've scrolled through the page before clicking, they'll get stuff they've already seen. 2. The old page doesn't go away; it's still in the window. However, because users think they're on a new page, they'll try to figure out how the "new" information differs from what they've seen -- obviously, a futile task. 3. No new page is loaded into the browser window: it displays the same data, just scrolled differently. 4. Rather than land at the top of the page, you typically find yourself somewhere in the middle with no navbar or other expected top-of-page design elements. 5. Clicking Back doesn't take you to the previous page; it takes you to the previous scroll state of the same page. This can doubly confuse users who've scrolled to the top of the page before clicking Back. After experiencing a few within-page links and Back button clicks, most users are completely confused about where they are on a site. Our studies also show that such links typically waste far more time than they save because users click back and forth multiple times and repeatedly review the same material. Source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/within_page_links.html

"The key to success is to optimize pages without making them read as though they were written for a search engine. SEO copywriting is a skill that grows over time, should you choose to pursue it."
Source: Dan Thies: "The Search Engine Marketing Kit"